Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review

Last Updated on February 3, 2022 by FauxHammer

2022 is already shaping up to be a good year for fans of Warhammer boxes. The latest release from Games Workshop, the Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set aims to turn the game’s greenest recruits into confident warmongers, as at home in the close-quarters skirmish warfare of the 41st Millennium as they would be anywhere else.

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Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Summary

Whilst it’s occasionally let down by a clunky beginner’s guide, there’s a lot to like in the new Kill Team Starter Set box. Awesome miniatures and some excellent savings make it easier than ever to get into the latest edition of Games Workshops fast-paced tabletop skirmish wargame.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Introduction

With the success of Kill Team: Octarius back in August/September of last year, and its unforgettable follow-up, Kill Team: Chalnath, Games Workshop are on something of a high with their recent run of new edition Kill Team releases – so much so, they just announced Kill Team: Nachmund at the Las Vegas Open.

With Kill Team getting so much attention at the moment following the release of its new edition last year, the provision of a starter set to get the uninitiated into the game was, perhaps, something of an inevitability.

That box has now arrived, and as far as I can tell, it’s basically just Kill Team: Octarius having lost a ton of weight. There are a lot of similarities between the original new edition Kill Team release and the new Starter Set, so let’s have a proper look at what’s going on in the latest box from GW.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Unboxing

Let’s have a look at the box close-up first of all and see what we’ve got inside it.

As ever, the artwork on the box is outstanding. Depicting an intrepid team of retail workers dealing with some average Saturday customers the Death Korps of Krieg facing off against the rampaging Ork Kommandos, the box cover sets the tone for Kill Team: cramped, claustrophobic, and brutal.

What I always find amusing about the art on these boxes is how, rather like in the Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, in spite of the chaotic battle taking place between two heavily-armed and bloodthirsty factions and all the sharp edges, shooty bits and explosions, no one appears to have been even remotely injured.

Anyway, let’s get the box open and see what we have inside-…oh, wait a moment.

What’s this?

As I went to open the box by its left-hand tab, I heard a ripping from the rear of the package. Initially, I thought that maybe I’d neglected to remove some tape that had been applied to keep the tabs secure, but on closer inspection, it turned out that there’s a sticker on the back of the box.

The sticker, which is printed to contain the box’s contents list, has been placed very carefully over the original contents list on the back of the box, obscuring it entirely (you can just about make out the DKoK Transfer Sheet underneath all the ripped sticker). Intrigued, and wondering what secrets the sticker may be hiding, I tried to remove it but had no luck. Unfortunately, the sticker is both extremely sticky and very fragile – there’s no way I’m getting this off in one piece, nor without wrecking whatever is hidden underneath.

Oh well. Moving on, and sliding the card tray out of the box itself, we’re met with our sprues.

There are 6 sprues in total in this box: 1 for the Combat Gauges and Kill Team Barricades, 4 for the Kill Teams themselves, and 1 for the Ork scenery.

Beneath lies the (somewhat plain) divider, designed to keep the pointy bits of your sprues from damaging the books and other paper goodies that lie beneath. Mine has a couple of holes in this time – you can see the largest on the guardsman’s right shoulder.

And finally, we have everything else.

The Mini Core Rules is packaged in its own shrink-wrap, whilst the Recruit Edition book, the build instructions and the tokens are packaged separately. The Double-Sided Game Mat is also packaged by itself in its own plastic wallet.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Contents

There’s a decent amount of stuff in the Kill Team Starter Set box, and as I said above, anyone who snapped up a copy of Kill Team: Octarius will recognise quite a lot of it.

So, in all that’s:

• 1 x 96-page mini Core Rules
• 1 x 56-page Recruit Book
• 23 x Citadel Miniatures
  • 11 Death Korps of Krieg Veteran Guardsmen (there are only ten in the photo above, as I didn’t build the variant of the Veteran Guardsman medic who has a bag on its own base this time around)
  • 12 Ork Kommandos (well, 10 kommados, a bomb squig and a sneaky grot)
• 12 x Scenery
  • 6 x Kill Team Barricades
  • 6 x Ork terrain pieces
• 3 x Combat Gauges
• 2 x Transfer Sheets
• Double-sided game mat
• Kill Team token sheet containing 85 tokens
• 10 x Dice

Let’s take a closer look at everything in turn.

The Literature

There are two books in the Kill Team Starter Set. One is the all-important (and oddly named) “Recruit Edition” book, which is essentially a beginners guide designed to teach brand-new players of Kill Team all the stuff they need to get playing.

The other is the Core Rules book. This is the Kill Team bible that contains absolutely all the information you could ever possibly need to get your games of Kill Team going. Well, almost all the information you could ever need – it doesn’t have all that useful stuff in the Kill Team Compendium, but I’ve promised myself I won’t start on that here today (because I spent quite a few words on it in the Octarius review).

Core Rules

As far as I can tell, the smaller Core Rules book that comes with the Kill; Team Starter Set is largely identical to its full-sized forbearer. It doesn’t have the first 50 pages of 40K background and cinematic pictures of miniatures that the full-sized Core Rules book has, but as far as the actual rules content is concerned, the pages are identical – just a little bit smaller.

As you can see, it’s half the size of a “regular” A4 Games Workshop book.

I’d be inclined to argue, though, that its smaller size makes it all the more useful. Rather like the paperback Age of Sigmar slimline rulebooks that occasionally appear in AoS boxed releases, the fact that this book is a little smaller makes it more user-friendly.

Think about it: when you’re trying to spin dice and skip miniatures across a gaming surface, the last thing you want is for a large part of that gaming surface to be taken up with a large and ungainly book. Having the core rules at half-size makes it more useful, and far easier to tuck away to one side when it’s not being used.

It’s a good book, too. Rules books can often be daunting tomes rammed full of minutiae and errata that serves more to confuse than enlighten. The Kill Team Core Book, however, is a well-written exercise in brevity and structure that other creators of rules manuals could stand to learn a thing or two from. Still, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to learn to play from, simply because there’s so much info in it.

No, if you’re here to learn to play you’ll want the Recruit Edition book.

Recruit Edition Book

As of writing this part of the review (starting at about 12:34 on 29/01/2021), I’m looking at my schedule over the next few days and I’m afraid I have to admit I’m not going to have time to do an in-depth playtest of the Kill Team Starter Set like I normally would when reviewing a GW Starter Set. Boo.

To make up for this, I’m going to go through this book and have a much more in-depth look at it than I would when normally looking at these kinds of books for reviews. I often try to keep things brief so as not to spoil the content for would-be buyers too much, but today we’re going to have a proper up-close and personal look to see just how useful it will be for beginners trying to get to grips with the latest edition of Kill Team’s gaming system.

As far as beginners are concerned, this book is possibly the single most important resource in this box. Sitting down and trying to riddle out how to actually play an entire game of Kill Team from the Core Rules isn’t an easy thing to do, as the rules aren’t necessarily written or formatted in such away that one might come across them whilst actually playing Kill Team. The Kill Team rules book, much like its cousins in Age of Sigmar or proper Warhammer 40,000, are meant to be used as indices of reference to which one can refer at various points through set-up and play. They aren’t designed to be a cover-to-cover read (though don’t let that stop you if you feel so inclined).

The Recruit Edition book – weird name, more on that later – aims to subvert this by providing new players with a step-by-step guide on playing their first few games of Kill Team. You’re supposed to be able to go from one page to the next, playing along with what’s in the book, and with each page get closer and closer to a comprehensive understanding of Kill Team.

The first 13 pages of the book are – much like the full Core Rules book – dedicated to the background. There’s a smattering of info about Kill Team lore, as well as some information on the game itself and how to go about collecting the miniatures you may want in order to build your own Kill Team.

After that, the guide begins proper with a 2-page spread listing all the stuff you’ll need for a game – dice, Combat Gauges, a “killzone” (basically just your playing area), the datacards for your miniatures (which, ofr the figures in this set, are included in the back of this book), and the combat tokens you’ll need. Everything is explained in clear and simple terms and with pictures, so even if you’ve never heard of a token before, you’ll be fully enlightened as to what one is by the time you turn the page.

The next 23 pages – the majority of the remaining book – is given over to playing Kill Team. Four missions are spread across the remaining pages, each one of which is designed to get new players thinking about Kill Team and familiarising themselves with the basic rules and key concepts.

But I have to admit, I don’t think the book actually does a brilliant job of making the game as accessible as it could do.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First off, the mission walkthroughs are extremely hand-holdy, so much so that the missions instruct players what to do with each figure in each turn. There’s not much room for on-the-spot learning or interpretation. Whilst this is great for hammering home key info about certain mechanics, things are a little bit rigid, and the “playing” one does doesn’t really seem like playing. You expect the training wheels to be bolted on pretty tight, but you were expecting dad to let go of the handlebars.

The other issue with the Recruit Edition guidebook is that, at times, it’s not very well-written, nor very well-formatted.

Take Mission 1, for example. Mission 1 is about driving home the two single-most important concepts that you will be totally unable to play Kill Team without. This is likely the most important part of the tutorial, and some of the most fundamentally important pages in this book. Can you guess what they cover?

Yup, you guessed it. Moving and shooting.

The players each take a few of their models (outlined in the mission set up) and deploys them as shown in the book. The objective is to move to the end of the killzone and prevent your opponent from doing the same.

But there are a lot of words standing between brand-new players and success in this mission. 7 pages (yes, 7!) are given over to explaining how to get your figures from one end of the board to the other, and how to have them crack off a few shots at each other as they go. Shooting is actually explained pretty well, so I’ll ease off on that, but moving is explained to the Nth degree, and not always in the most straightforward of formats or languages.

The remaining three missions continue in a fairly similar vein, with certain concepts being explained in good, clear terms, and others feeling a little murky. In Mission 2, for example, line of sight and cover are explained, but once again not necessarily in the most beginner-friendly of fashions.

The thing that threw me as I was reading through the Recruit Edition book were that concepts were not fully explained in one go. Now, this is a fairly common trick with these kinds of beginners guides: this approach of slowly, but not fully, removing the training wheels across the entire multi-mission tutorial guide is a very clever way of slowly reinforcing more complex mechanics for new players by gradually building up the information they need in a working, hands-on format (see, for example, any of the new AoS Starter Sets, which do this to absolute perfection).

However, if it’s done poorly, instead of being slowly drip-fed key concepts and ideas, players can be left with many unanswered questions, or a partial – or worse, incorrect – understanding of the game. For example, the Kill Team Recruit Edition book will insist that players set up their models with certain Orders, for example, but not explain in full why these orders have been selected, or what they mean.

Orders were, in fact, something that left me scratching my head as I went through the book. Orders, which enable and prevent your characters from performing certain actions (i.e. the Conceal Order allows operatives to hide more effectively, but means that can neither shoot nor charge) are only partially explained at the very start of Mission 1, and I found the explanation given didn’t answer a lot of my questions – such as when/how/can I even change an order. I found the answer to this 11 pages later at the end of Mission 2.

I’m not blown away by the Kill Team Recruit Edition book. Whilst I’ve no doubt that new players will be able to sit down and eventually muddle through the 4 missions in the book, it’s not going to be quite the smooth and quick-fire experience that GW are trying to turn Kill Team into.

There are some moments of clarity and brilliance – Shoot and Fight, for example – but a concerningly large portion of the book will leave a lot of newcomers to the game with more questions than answers. Whilst it’s not a flat-out useless resource by any stretch of the imagination, it’s definitely not the most beginner-friendly guidebook that GW have ever produced.

I’m going to make it known here that I think it’s odd that this book is called the Recruit Edition, and since Stickergate back in the Unboxing section of this review, my overactive imagination has been cooking up all sorts of conspiracy theories about these two (likely unrelated) things.

I do wonder if maybe, much like the Warhammer 40,000 Recruit, Elite and Command Edition Starter Sets, originally GW had planned for three such “edition-style” starter sets for Kill Team, but the idea was scrapped. That would at the very least explain why the Recruit Edition book – which would be much better named as something like “Starter Book” or “Beginners Guide” – has something of a jarring name.

Wargear

As it’s a box aimed in part at brand new beginners and Kill Team novices, there’s a fair amount of gaming accessories (or what we’ve taken to calling “Wargear” since Ben did in his Warhammer 40,000: Elite Edition Starter Set Review back in August 2020) included in the box.

Combat Gauges

Whilst brand new players will likely not spare the Combat Gauges much of a second thought, wargaming enthusiasts or other folks who have previously come into contact with Kill Team – and, well, literally any other Games Workshop game ever for that matter – will note that Kill Team’s distances are no longer measured in inches.

Take them for what you will. They look cool and will make your gaming set up look all the more complete should you paint them up in some fancy colours, but personally I don’t really see what’s wrong with a tape measure or a regular ruler.

Double-Sided Game Mat

Not a board this time, I’m afraid, but a mat. Printed on glossy paper, the gaming mat that comes with the Kill Team Starter Set won’t have the longevity of one of the gaming board that are occasionally released in these kinds of boxes. The paper is much more likely to tear and will have some fairly prominent fold lines in it when laid out flat. I haven’t been able to unfold mine and fit it in my lightbox (as usual), but here’s a picture of it folded so you can get an idea of what you’re getting.

As far as I can tell, the double-sided game mat has the same (and if not the same, a very familiar) print on it to the gaming board that came with Kill Team: Octarius.

Still, in spite of all my naysaying, it’s a nice addition and will help new players create a more immersive wargaming experience on their table top, but this likely won’t cut the mustard for more experienced and serious players.

Tokens

Nothing like a handful of tokens to add a little pop o’ colour to your table top, no?

The Kill Team Starter Set tokens come on a perforated board that you’ll need to push them out of, just like the one below.

I had no trouble with mine, and none of the print ripped or was frayed at the edges as some cheaper push-out tokens occasionally can be when removed. Each token is also a different size, shape and has a clear symbol on it so it’s obvious at a glance what’s what.

Dice

As I said in the Kill Team: Octarius review I penned last year, I know a lot of people get quite frustrated when they open up their new boxed games and find either no dice or a bag of plain, boring black-and-white dice.

I’m not sure which people hate more. An absence of dice or the inclusion of bad dice.

I think the issue is caused by the fact such fantastic, creative and unique dice are so readily available these days from so many different outlets that a handful of plain dice slung into a box feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Well, dice-gripers rejoice. We’ve got orange dice!

Okay, okay, they might not be as exciting as your set of nebulous, colour-shifting Nahyndrian crystal dice that were forged in the heart of a dying star by Svartálfar and put on Etsy by some chap called Jason from Shropshire, but they are at least thematic, matching that orange streak we see in a lot of the new edition Kill Team art, and they don’t feel quite as cheap as some of the dice we’ve had in recent releases.

The Miniatures

This is where the new Kill Team Start Set gets quite good: the miniatures.

The two teams available in this set – the Veteran Guardsmen and the Ork Kommandos – are some seriously sweet little models.

Also, some of the photos in this part of the review might look just a teensy bit familiar to some of our most regular readers. That’s because I’ve nicked them from the original Kill Team: Octarius review that I did a few months ago (well, I took the original pictures, so am I really stealing them?).

Death Korps of Krieg

The Kill Team: Starter Set comes with everything you need to build 10 Veteran Guardsmen from the legendary Death Korps of Krieg. The sprues are arranged in a relatively straightforward layout: legs and coat-fronts will be near torsos, and whilst heads and arms may lie a little further away from the rest of their intended destinations, tracking them down isn’t too difficult on account of the fact some parts are clustered together by type – arms and heads, for example.

This number of miniatures you build can be increased from 10 to 11 if you decide to build one particular variant of the medic, whose satchel occupies its own base. Whilst we’re on variant builds, most of the guardsmen have two if not three different variations they can be built in, so make sure you take your time selecting the variant you want.

As I said above, there are plenty of build options across the set, too, so you don’t have to build the miniatures that you see here. Those miniatures that you don’t build will leave all their extra parts behind, so you’ve got plenty of bits left over to use in conversions or kitbashing, should such things take your fancy.

The Death Korps of Krieg Veteran Guardsmen are a really nice kit. Not too difficult to build in spite of being made up of several small components, and awash with extra pouches, grenades and, of course, their archetypical shovels, they’re an expressive and unique bunch of miniatures, overflowing with character and individuality.

Ork Kommandos

The Ork Kommamndos sprue is a bit more difficult to navigate than the Kriegers’. With many of the components for individual models scattered almost haphazardly across the sprue, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of rhyme nor reason to how things are arranged. Be prepared to have to do a reasonable amount of hunting for each figure.

The trade-off is that the Kommandos aren’t as bitty to do as the Death Korps of Krieg. With larger components and less stuff to stick together, they’re a much easier build (not that the DkoK were particularly hard in the first place).

Like their Vetersan Guardsmen foes, the Kommandos are also provided with plenty of optional extras: knives, holsters, grenades, and the popular multi-tool affectionately dubbed the Swiss Waaaghmy Knife.

There are also plenty of variant builds again – most of the time each Kommando can be built in at least one if not two alternate ways, with different weapon options and slightly different poses.

They’re another really great kit. Each miniature is bursting with personality and is utterly unique. As with all of the recent 40K Ork releases, the Kommandos kit does a great job of treading the fine line between “pant-wettingly hilarious” and “flat-out terrifying” that Orks in the 41st Millennium love to use as a skipping rope (or as something to strangle a particularly beefy foe with).

Scenery

The scenery that comes with this set – that’s the Kill Team Barricades and the Ork Terrain – are blissfully easy to assemble. And that’s because they don’t actually require any assembly at all.

Each bit of terrain in this kit can be clipped straight off the sprue, which is great if you just need some quick and easy bits of scenery to add a little pizazz to your games of Kill Team. There is, of course, no need to paint them before you use them, but everything in Warhammer looks better with a few coats of paint.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Price and Availability

Trying to create a price/value breakdown for the new Kill Team: Starter Set is quite difficult. Usually, when we put together these lists for boxes that contain things like exclusive miniatures, we look at the faction the miniature is from and figure out a like-for-like.

However, this isn’t so easy to do with the Kill Team Starter Set. Whilst all the miniatures in the box are available in their own individual kits, a lot of the value of this box lies in the other stuff that comes with it to help you actually play the game, such as the rules books and the combat gauges.

However, these items don’t often have a direct like-for-like available. Whilst you can compare the new Auric Flamekeeper from the Fury of the Deep box to an Auric Runemaster easily enough to work out a rough price comparison, it’s not so easy to draw a parallel between the Kill Team Starter Set Core Rules book and the much larger full-price Core Rules available separately.

Also, a lot of the Kill Team stuff available from GW at the moment is sold in bundles, which makes figuring out a price per component all the more difficult. Anyway, I’ve done my best below – but take this with a pinch of salt.

* Based on the next best available thing with the same information, which is the Core Rules book.
** The Recruit Book is one of those resources that’s completely unique to the box it comes in, so it’s almost impossible to gauge the value of as there is no other standalone product like it within GW’s range. It seems relatively fair to include the Recruit Book in the value ascribed to the mini Core Rules book.
*** Based on Kill Team: Kill Zone Essentials.
**** Based on Wall of Martyrs Imperial Defence Line, Battlezone: Manufactorum – Conservators, and other similar products.

Whilst it’s clear that the Kill Team Starter Set is excellent value (I mean, the price of the box is cheaper than buying both the Ork Kommandos and Veteran Guardsmen kits together), please takes these pricings/savings with a pinch of salt. There’s a lot of guesswork involved here, and comparing the much smaller Mini Core Rules that comes in the Starter Set with the Core Book available separately is a bit of a leap – even if we do leave the Recruit Edition book unpriced/include it in the value ascribed to the Core Rules book.

As it’s not been billed as a limited release, we anticipate that the Kill Team Starter Set should be available for quite some time, just like the Warhammer 40,000 Recruit, Elite and Command Edition Starter Sets and the Age of Sigmar Warrior, Harbinger and Extremis Starter Sets have been. Whilst they’ll be readily available on both Games Workshops’ webstore (and likely in your local Warhammer store), your local independent hobby stockist might be able to offer you a discounted price, so always check there first.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set Review – Final Thoughts

There’s a lot to love in the new Kill Team Starter Set. However, there are also a few bits that could’ve been done a tiny bit better.

Let’s start with the not-so-goods, as there is basically only one: the Recruit Edition book. From a confusing name, to often confusing and poorly-formatted content, the Recruit Edition book does not stand amidst the greats in Warhammer beginners guides – those titles are still held by the guides in the 40K Ninth Edition and AoS Third Edition Starter Sets. You’ll need at least a reasonable understanding of wargames and TTRPGs in order to make it through certain parts of the book, which immediately makes it a tricky one for anyone planning on making Kill Team their first table top wargame.

But that’s more-or-less it. The clunky book is the only outlier in what is otherwise a really nice box of stuff. The slimline Kill Team Core Rules book is an excellent resource for more experienced players to have, and even if you couldn’t give a hoot about actually playing Kill Team, picking up this box with a mind to painting the plastic that comes with it will save you money when compared to buying the Veteran Guardsman and Ork Kommandos kits seperately.

All in all, this is a decent box. It’s not quite perfect, but you’re still very unlikely to be dissatisfied.

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Summary

Reviewer

Rob Hebblethwaite

Review Date

Reviewed Item

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set

Author Rating

4

Product Name

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Starter Set